Several months ago I became so busy with work that I subconsciously compiled a script that auto-executed every time someone asked any question vaguely resembling, “How have you been?”. I didn’t have time to think of a human answer, so without hesitation, the canned response “busy” would sound from my lips.

Often times we get so busy with work we become robotic, and even worse – we forget to live. The funny thing is, by the time we realize it, rather than making some significant change, we just keep working to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable truth. As we strive to stay current with the evolution of technologies, certifications and the world around us, we quickly become overwhelmed, placing our wellbeing and sense of self at risk. We have a thousand things going on at work, two thousand things to catch up on, a hundred books to read, tests to take, projects to complete, deadlines to meet, and, oh yeah, an entirely separate life to live with family and loved ones, plus housework, hobbies and so on, all with a phone screen glued to our eyes, constantly checking email and social media. It’s quite an amazing feat to take on such a loaded life and remain happy. Read More »

We asked the 2014 Cisco Champions what advice they would give to someone starting in the IT industry. Cisco Champions are seasoned IT technical experts and influencers who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and thoughts across the social web and with Cisco. The Cisco Champions program encompasses different areas of interest, such as Data Center, Internet of Things, Enterprise Networks, Collaboration and Security. Cisco Champions are located all over the world.(Cisco Champions are not representatives of Cisco. Their views are their own)

Here are their top 5 tips.

1. Be a Specialist AND a GeneralistSpecialize in your field, but keep general knowledge of related fields. So if you’re a networking expert, make sure to know servers, virtualization, storage and voice among others. You’ll thank yourself when you can troubleshoot problems that aren’t necessarily the network.
Benjamin Story
Network Engineer@ntwrk80Read More »

“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity”. ~ Plato

November 6, 2014 marked the one-year anniversary since the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) was officially announced in the ACI Launch Event at Waldorf Astoria, New York City. I had the privilege to attend the event; I thought to myself that if Cisco had picked NYC for an announcement that’s got to be serious. Also after living over 20 years in NYC/NJ area, I had never stepped in the historic Waldorf Astoria!

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to come up from my rabbit hole of deployment projects and catch up on the tech news. In particular, the announcement at Interop New York where Cisco announced the new ISR 4400 family of routers along with a fewotherarticles got me to thinking about how far branch office connectivity has come in the past decade or so and to a question: is one method of branch connectivity better than another?

In the Beginning…

In the past decade or so we have seen substantial change in how we connect to the internet and how fast we do so. Early on (circa early 2000s) the internet was fairly flat. Real time voice and video were still a thing of science fiction. In the enterprise we connected remote offices back to the central office via leased lines over a frame relay network. T1s were considered good and if you had a DS-3 link you must have been in a big IT shop. Compute services were limited to corporate email (Outlook/Exchange were the new kids on the block) and client/server based systems. Read More »

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